Multi-booting Solaris and other operating systems

V.5 Two hard disks, Solaris, Windows NT - performance

Overview

There are two hard disk drives on the system running Solaris and Windows NT. FAT-16 partition, is used to exchange data between two systems. Solaris boot manager boots both systems.

Solaris and NT are installed considering performance over safety, that is, every system occupies the part of each hard disk. This way both hard disks work at the time for Solaris or NT.

Partitioning

Hard disks will be partitioned as follows (proportions are meaningless):

HDD-1

1. Primary - NTFS
Windows NT


2. Primary - Solaris UFS
Solaris
active

HDD-2

1. Primary - Solaris UFS



2. Extended

		2.1. FAT-16

		2.2. NTFS

		2.3. NTFS

Recipe

Connect hardware and configure BIOS. Set HDD-1 as the boot drive (see IV.1 for details).
Install Windows NT. During setup, create a primary NTFS partition on HDD-1 for NT system (see notes on the size). After that you should be able to boot NT. The primary partition becomes C:.
Create Solaris partition.
Install Solaris. Select HDD-1 and HDD-2 for installation. Create primary Solaris partitions: one on the remainder of HDD-1 and one on HDD-2. Slice those partition according to your needs. You may put swap file system on HDD-1 and /usr on HDD-2. This can improve performance, but is unsafe since Solaris will not boot with HDD-2 disconnected.
The Solaris partition on HDD-1 becomes active and Solaris boot manager will appear after reboot. To boot NT select 1, i.e. NTFS partition, in the manager.
Boot NT and use its Disk Administrator to create an extended partition on HDD-2. Create FAT-16 logical volume and assign it some later drive letter e.g. S: (like share). Its size should not exceed 1 GB to get reasonable cluster size. Create NTFS logical volumes, for user data, applications, archives etc. Assign drive letters D:, E: etc. for all created volumes and CD-ROM(s).
Under Solaris, create /share directory, and add the following line:
```
/dev/dsk/c0t1d0p2:c	-	/share	pcfs	-	yes	-
```
to /etc/vfstab file to mount FAT-16 volume automatically at the boot time (see notes on mounting FAT partitions). If HDD-2 is an IDE drive use c0d1p2:c, if it is slave on the primary channel, or c1d0p2:c if it is master on the secondary channel.

Remarks: Linux can be added easily as a third operating system. It is enough to leave some space on HDD-1 during Solaris setup, and on extended partition on HDD-2. Then install Linux according to instructions in section 2.